How to get your YouTube channel noticed

So you’re new to YouTube – or you’ve been here a while, and you’re still struggling to get noticed. You’re reading this because you want to know how to get your YouTube channel noticed.

You spend time creating content and getting it seen is important, but how can you do that effectively?

Well, you’re in luck! At Grin, we help YouTubers get noticed all the time, it’s what we do. If you’ve been following us, you know last week we covered 3 tips for making money on YouTube. Now, we’re excited to bring you this concise list of 9 simple tactics you can employ to get your YouTube channel noticed. These are simple & effective strategies you can employ immediately to start getting some viewers to your channel.

Don’t have enough time to read the entire thing? We’ve also assembled this infographic, a check list to take with you as you’re looking for ways to grow. So download, save it & refer to it often. OK, enough with the small talk, let’s get down to business.

Engage In The Comments of Other Videos

You probably see this one all the time- you’re watching your favorite videos, and you see other popular YouTubers in the comments below them. These people are established content creators, so their fans are encouraged to upvote their comments and speak to them. Upvotes and discussion result in high-ranked comments in YouTube’s new system, and this is one way to get your YouTube channel noticed.

This goes both ways- not only does it expose the viewers of the host channel to an outside channel, an outside channel may be exposing their own audience to the host. While this may be obviously beneficial to the one that’s posting their comment, it definitely can help the person who made the video to begin with. This is the easiest way to get your YouTube channel noticed.

Make Your Tags With SEO In Mind

If you’re worried about getting your YouTube channel noticed but are ignoring SEO, it’s time to stop and give you a lesson about the Internet. Google and other search engines drive the most web traffic on the Internet- search engine optimization, or SEO, deals with that.

Creating tags for your videos works out just like tags in web pages- tags given in videos are used for search results. This means you want to have as much information as possible in your tags, but you also don’t want to flood it with irrelevant or false information (which can be punished). Here’s a few tags to include in every video:

• Your channel name or other identifier. It also doesn’t hurt to add a few more tags using your name, but instead use something like “[your name] advice”, “[your name] commentary”, or whatever it is that you are doing in the video.
• What you’re doing in the video. One example of a popular sub-genre of video is what’s called a “frag video”. However, you also want to include the name of the game itself in these. “COD frag videos”, “TF2 frags”, etc. Whatever you’re making, you want the tags to indicate what that is and what it relates to.
• Prominent things in the video. Is it a classic Internet cat video? Put in the “cat video” tag!

When making tags, you should also keep in mind what other people in your niche are making. Don’t be afraid to look at what popular competitors are putting in their video tags: this can be fairly informative and can help you in the creation of your own tags.

Don’t forget to put your videos in the right category, either. Good tagging and good categories is how you get your YouTube channel noticed.

Create Effective Descriptions

Here’s a rule that people often forget: the first line of your description is the most important!

The way you start off your description is what search results are going to make their first look at. Your description should start off with one to two sentences that simply describe the contents of the video. Is it a video about how to get your YouTube channel noticed? Then you start with that! You can change it as you please, of course- if this were a video, ours would be “Grin tells you how to get your YouTube channel noticed”. You want to get the point of the video across while also sneaking in your keyword.

After the first line is where you get a little more room to manuever. Here you can add a longer synopsis to the contents of the video, or even create a table of contents for longer pieces.

In addition, this is where you start adding links. You want to link to your other social media outlets: Facebook, Twitter, etc, as well as other relevant pages. Are you doing a product review? Link to that product in your description in case your viewer is interested! Sponsor links can help here, too.

Also, don’t forget to share the love. If you’re using other people’s videos, link to them. If you’re using your own videos, link to them. If you’re collaborating with other channels, link to them! Making connections is a great way to get your YouTube channel noticed.

Use Evocative Thumbnails

Your thumbnails are the first thing a user sees when they glance at your video. On mobile devices especially, this is what people see before they even look at your title or description: so it needs to be good!

First off, using YouTube’s default thumbnail system is not how to get your YouTube channel noticed. In order to get your YouTube channel noticed, you should be creating your own thumbnails for your videos. But what do you put in those thumbnails?

A good place to start would be taking screenshots of key frames of your video. Add a filter that makes it look nice, crop or zoom as you please (and use the source video file for this, not the one YouTube compressed). And add text. Nothing too gaudy or over the top, just put the title on your video, as well as any icon or logo that users can see to identify your video.

Good visual design will help you get your YouTube channel noticed.

Avoid Cliches With An Effective CTA

Everyone’s seen it: at the end of a YouTube video, the person stops to beg you to like and subscribe, in that order. There’s nothing wrong with telling people to subscribe, but to a seasoned viewer this all sounds like white noise after a time. White noise isn’t how you get your YouTube channel noticed. Instead, find creative ways to subvert that. Find a unique way to ask users to toss you a little extra, and don’t hesitate to subvert that when necessary.

A good example of great end-video CTAs can be seen from LinusTechTips. No two end-video CTAs are the same.

Polish Your Channel’s Appearance

So your viewer just finished watching their first video from you, and now they’ve come to your channel for more. If they haven’t subscibed yet, this is where you greet them with a video made just for people who haven’t subscribed! If they are, here is where you put a highlight or one of your favorite videos on the channel they might not have seen yet.

That’s a basic tip on how to get your YouTube channel noticed, but that doesn’t mean that’s all. Your channel isn’t just your videos: it’s what’s holding those videos. Here is where you want to create a stunning YouTube channel banner that shows off you, your signature logo and any visually-pleasing imagery you think might work well with that.

Working on your banner isn’t all you need to get your YouTube channel noticed, either: you need to have your content organized into playlists and sorted accordingly across your page.

Socialize with other YouTubers, and Use Apps to Get Ahead

Other YouTubers are your brothers in arms in this great journey to make your channel more popular. Don’t be antagonistic to other people working in your genre- instead, socialize with them. If they’ve been in this longer than you or are bigger than you, don’t hesitate to ask them for feedback and advice. You can both learn something from each other, or even become partners and friends.

A good way to go about this is to use an app! If you really want to get your YouTube channel noticed, you should consider checking out our app, Grin. At Grin, we’re focused on helping you and 50,000 other content creators grow, providing a platform for you to get your YouTube channel noticed. Check us out if you want to get ahead!

Create Topical Response Videos

Remember The Fine Bros Fiasco? If you weren’t around when this happened, what happened was a popular YouTube channel known for their “REACT” series wanted to trademark their series and get other people to make react videos. Due to the way they approached it, however, other content creators demolished them for it. Our favorite example is Mega64’s, but you might have another.

You shouldn’t focus solely on topical videos- but the occasional response video to an event that you care about might just get a huge audience, or teach your audience more about you.

Collaborate With Other YouTubers

A prerequisite for making collaborations is actually meeting other YouTubers, mind. We recommend that you’ve followed the advice of #3 and have Grin installed before continuing.

That being said, of all the ways to get your YouTube channel noticed, this is the most powerful. Once you’ve socialized with other YouTubers and done a fine job creating your own content, it’s time to start making great collaborations! Having content you helped create hosted on other channels helps your popularity, and hosting content on your channel can help theirs, as well. This is a street of two-way benefits that all the big YouTubers have used at one point or another.